244 OUR ROCK-GARDEN 



One can only hope that this restoration to con- 

 sciousness was as much a matter of course as the 

 old writer suggests : the whole thing seems to us 

 perilously near to manslaughter. Even so early as 

 the days of Pliny (and they were very early days 

 indeed one must go back over nineteen hundred 

 years to arrive at them) divers herbs were com- 

 mended " to be given before incisions or punctures 

 are made in the body in order to ensure in- 

 sensibility to the patient." Drayton, in his " Quest 

 of Cynthia," calls the hemlock " the poisonedst 

 weed 1 that grows." 



The mediaeval herbalists all quote from Diosco- 

 rides the tale that " if asses do eate much of 

 Hemlockes they wyll be cast thereby into a deepe 

 and dead sleepe, that they wyll seeme to be dead. 

 Which hath deceyued the countrey men being 

 ignorant thereof : for as they have bene fleying of 

 theyr skynes (thynking that they were dead) the 

 sely asses have sturred and wakened out of their 

 sleepe : to the great terror of them that did flea 



1 Coles, in his quaint u Art of Simpling," issued in the year 

 1656, writes : u I find no word for a weed, either in Latin or 

 Greek, yet because it is so common a word in England, I 

 make that a kinde, and thereof are Chickweed, Horehound, 

 Archangell, Cleavers, Groundsell, Nettles, Hemlock, Bind- 

 weed, Poppy, &c. This is a division (I confesse) I never 

 met with in any Author, and some faults haply may be 

 found in it, but herein you may perceive that I endeavour 

 (as much as I can) to condescend to capacities of the vulgar, 

 whose good I heartily wish." 



